


Third Time's the Charm

by hawkeward



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types
Genre: Asexual Character, Asexuality, First Kiss, Gen, Pre-Dragon Age: Origins
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-08
Updated: 2013-11-08
Packaged: 2017-12-31 21:13:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,403
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1036462
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hawkeward/pseuds/hawkeward
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Three times Farrah Amell was kissed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Third Time's the Charm

Farrah was just shy of thirteen years old when she was first kissed.

He was an elf, a year or two older than she, but in the same class group. They studied together sometimes, and he would tell her what he remembered of the world outside the tower. His deep green eyes lit up like gems in his pale face as he talked.

She liked him. He was easy to talk to, and he smiled at her often.

They were sitting together in an empty study room, trying to puzzle out a difficult line of the poem they had been assigned to translate as the afternoon sunlight streamed in over the desk, when he touched her hand. She turned to him, surprised, and he leaned in and kissed her.

It was a simple kiss, just a gentle press of his mouth to hers. His lips were chapped, and he smelled like the fish chowder they'd had at midday. A strand of his fine brown hair tickled her cheek itchily, and she wanted to brush it away.

But other than that, she felt nothing. No tingling fizz up her spine, no butterflies in her stomach, no surge of heat rushing through her body. None of the things described in giggling whispers by the other girls in the dormitory.

He pulled away and smiled at her, a bit nervously. She could only stare at him, strangely tense.

His smile faltered. "That bad?"

She shrugged miserably, at a loss for words.

Her distress must have shown, because he moved away until there was a comfortable distance between them again. "It's all right," he said quickly, "You don't like elves, or maybe you like girls, or—"

He stood abruptly, scooping up his papers and quill. "I'll just... uh—," he stammered, and fled before she could reply.

He apologized the next day, but they did not study together again.

—

She was fourteen when she decided she couldn't avoid it any longer.

All the other girls' favorite topic of conversation, all they would talk about, was who among the older apprentices was kissing whom. Or, with growing frequency, who  _they_  would each like to kiss. She wasn't sure which was worse—the gossip was tedious, to be sure, but the second line of conversation inevitably led to questions she couldn't answer, followed by humiliating speculation.

Girls, the elf-boy had said. She had never thought much about girls one way or the other, but she certainly didn't fancy any of the boys whose names circled the dormitory. So she started watching them.

She watched one in particular, with straight dark hair and soft brown skin and a smile like sunlight, always surrounded by friends. Easy with her laughter and her touches. Watching her made Farrah feel... a kind of yearning, though it didn't seem quite like the messy, heated kind described in the tattered books the apprentices passed furtively from mattress to mattress. But maybe it was enough.

The girl surprised her by approaching her in the refectory, near the end of the midday meal. "I've seen you watching me," she said, almost shyly.

Farrah felt a deep blush spread over her cheeks. "You're very pretty," she replied, and instantly regretted the inanity of her off-guard statement. It wasn't quite what she meant, either, which troubled her.

The girl seemed pleased, however. "I think you're very pretty, too," she giggled. She lowered her voice, smiling warmly. "I'll be in the library during free period this afternoon, if you want to meet up."

The sun was slanting orange through the high library windows when Farrah her there. The girl led her to a secluded area of the shelves, ill-traveled by templars and older mages alike. There she smiled her sunlight smile, and took Farrah's face in her hands, and kissed her.

Her mouth was soft and warm, in distracting contrast with her cool hands on Farrah's cheeks, and her hair carried the scent of the herbal soap in the apprentices' baths. Her lips moved disconcertingly against Farrah's own, as if trying to coax some feeling from her, but there was nothing. No heat, no feeling at all aside from the base sensation.

The girl drew away, face slightly flushed, expression apprehensive as she looked to Farrah for some response. Farrah could only shake her head mutely.

"I see," the girl said flatly. "So what was this, then? A joke? A bet?"

"I'm sorry, I just wanted to know—"

"I'm so glad I managed to satisfy your curiosity, then," the girl spat, tears of fury growing in her eyes. "Don't bother coming near me ever again." She shoved past Farrah, knocking her into the bookshelf.

Farrah saw her the next day in the refectory, talking and laughing with her friends as they ate.

Deliberately, she turned away and sat alone.

—

She gave it one more chance when she was nearly seventeen.

She barely spoke to her peers, anymore, choosing instead to throw herself completely into her studies. They had all grown increasingly unbearable, anyway, as they grew older and turned to pursuits more advanced than simple kissing. At least their teasing and lewd speculation had eventually stopped, but whispers remained—she was cold, they said, or she thought herself too good for everyone, or there was something alien and wrong about her.

Nonetheless, not long after Irving chose her for his student, she noticed another boy watching her. They were grouped together for the general classes all apprentices still had to attend, and he made sure to catch her eye every time he offered a freckled, scapegrace grin and a witty reply to an enchanter's question. When he approached her with a thinly-veiled invitation, she surprised everyone, including perhaps herself, by accepting.

That evening he drew her to a disused closet, where he already had straw and blankets spread on the stone floor. That brought her up short—was he that sure of himself? Or did he bring a different girl here each week, and find it more efficient to leave everything set up? Her eyebrows crept upward at the sheer audacity of it all.

He must have interpreted her look as an invitation, because he grinned roguishly. Then he put one hand on her neck and the other on her waist, pulled her to him, and kissed her sloppily.

She was caught off-guard, and he took advantage of the opportunity to thrust his tongue into her mouth. She nearly jerked her head away at that, the sensation was so repulsive. Her muscles tensed as his mouth moved to her neck and his hands roamed over her body. If what everyone said was to be believed, she should be melting right now, trembling putty in the hands of pleasure. But there was nothing, save the noisy suckling at her throat and the hands fumbling awkwardly down her torso and his smug overconfidence. When the hands finally wandered to the closures of her robes, she decided she had had enough.

"We're done," she said through gritted teeth, working her arms into what little space remained between between their bodies and pushing him away.

He stumbled back a step and stared at her, open-mouthed. His lips were shiny with saliva. "But we just got started."

"I've had enough."

"What's wrong? Did I move too fast? Give me another chance, we can start over." He reached for her again, smiling.

She took that as a cue to encase the reaching hand in ice. He yelped, cradling it back to his chest as he glared at her. "I can freeze other parts of you just as easily," she remarked. "As I said, we're done. Now go get that seen to before your fingers fall off."

He paused at the door to look back at her. "You really are a cold bitch, just like they all say," he snarled, and was gone.

Trembling and alone, she sat down on the blankets and hugged her knees to her chest. It didn't matter, she told herself. Eventually she would be Harrowed, and could start doing real research, and people would care about that instead of whether or not she liked to be kissed or anything else.

No one could say she hadn't tried. She'd had her fill, and anyone who wanted otherwise could just leave her be.

—

When she felt the young templar's eyes begin to linger on her and the gossip began again, she pretended not to notice.


End file.
